Carney signs Executive Order to expand open data in Delaware

Gov. John Carney signs Executive Order 18 expanding the Delaware Open Data Council to include members from all Executive Branch agencies to promote data sharing.
Suchat Pederson/The News Journal

Gov. John Carney signs Executive Order 18 expanding the Delaware Open Data Council to include members from all Executive Branch agencies to promote data sharing.(Photo: Suchat Pederson, The News Journal-USA TODAY NETWORK)

An executive order signed Monday morning by Gov. John Carney makes a few minor changes to and builds on the foundation laid by a Gov. Markell-led effort to create an open data portal for the state of Delaware.

Executive Order 18, signed by Carney at The Mill in Wilmington, expands the Delaware Open Data Council to include members from all executive branch agencies to promote data sharing.

"I like big data and I cannot lie," said James Collins, Chief Information Officer, Delaware Department of Technology and Information.

The Delaware Open Data Council, established in January 2016 with Executive Order 57, is tasked with establishing a statewide data strategy and recommends standards and policies relating to the posting of non-personally-identifiable public data on a centralized portal, found at data.delaware.gov.

James Collins, Delaware Chief Information Officer, speaks at The Mill before Gov. John Carney signs Executive Order 18 expanding the Delaware Open Data Council to include members from all Executive Branch agencies to promote data sharing.(Photo: Suchat Pederson, The News Journal-USA TODAY NETWORK)

The portal, Collins said, has amassed more than 3.5 million page views and now contains more than 200 items available to the public, including data sets, charts and maps.

The top data sets accessed last month include Delaware business licenses, the State of Delaware Checkbook and professional and occupational licensing.

Carney's latest executive order requires executive branch agencies to create an inventory of additional data sets that could be added to the Open Data Portal. Those additional sets identified in the inventory are to be published by 2020. Carney is also encouraging the Open Data Council to provide technical assistance to other state government bodies to make more data available on the portal.

"It’s a way of opening up the government to the people that own the government, if you will, so that they have access to their data and they can understand what’s going on," Carney said. "It’s an exercise in transparency."

And while the information available is extremely useful for the public and for those interested, for example, in opening a business, the available data is also valuable for government agencies to explore information.

Executive Order 18 expands the Delaware Open Data Council to include members from all Executive Branch agencies.(Photo: Suchat Pederson, The News Journal-USA TODAY NETWORK)

"We're bringing the government into this new world and harnessing technology to change people’s lives," Carney said. "The state really has to be a leader in that. We’re trying to address issues and problems here in the city and across our state using our own data and having difficulty doing that."

"No longer is this just in the purview of the savvy media marketers, who’ve been using this data for years to get us to buy stuff," Collins said.

"Government has traditionally lagged behind because its corporate counterparts are investing in data systems and strategic planning to outline how to collect and transform that data."

Collins said the partnership between the Delaware Department of Transportation and the navigation app, Waze, is an example of how government is using data to improve the lives of Delawareans. The data sharing is addressing other timely issues like the opioid crisis and unemployment.

Eleven new data sets were added last year, including Delaware business licenses and air quality monitoring, among others.

The Open Data Council will now include members from 18 state agencies and offices, including, Collins said, the Department of Corrections.

Guests gather at The Mill co-working space in Wilmington for Gov. John Carney's signing of Executive Order 18.(Photo: Suchat Pederson, The News Journal-USA TODAY NETWORK)

David Ginzberg, founder of Open Data Delaware, said the data has been helpful to small business owners to identify the best place to locate. Additionally, projects with the Food Bank of Delaware have helped identify food waste and potential hurdles to the logistical process to ensure that people who have an excess of food, like farms, have somewhere to send it.

Open data has also been crucial in the expansion of Delaware's startup culture. In the building that used to be part of DuPont's Wilmington empire, Carney remarked about the importance of The Mill in housing the future of Delaware's economy. Mill founder Robert Herrera said the coworking space now has 300 members and last year had about 700 non-members on premises. Herrera touted open data's use for companies like Compass Red, a data and analytics lab which has its East Coast headquarters at The Mill.